Facebook Users On Android Outnumbered iOS [Charts]

Benedict Evans has recently published an article showing the traffic for Facebook apps.

Until late last year, Facebook disclosed monthly active users (MAUs, hereafter ‘users’ for simplicity) for its smartphone apps, on a rolling daily basis. I was always slightly nervous of publishing it, since you had to know how to get it and I suspected it might disappear if anyone pointed it out. Now, like fairy gold, the data has disappeared, so I can share it.

First, the eye-catching numbers:
– In September 2012, Facebook reported 470m users of its smartphone apps for iPhone, Android, RIM, Nokia, Windows Phone and J2ME (‘Featurephone)
– It had a further (presumably overlapping) 45m users of its iPad app, out of around 100m active devices
– Out of 1.07bn total users, Facebook reported 604m ‘mobile users’, implying that 134m were not using these apps and hence were using the mobile web
– Obviously, these numbers are not exclusive: many, if not all, of the people using mobile apps are also using the desktop site

This chart compares Facebook’s mobile numbers for September 2012 versus September 2011.